Erin Breen: Skin in the game

3:24 AM,
Jan. 25, 2014

Written by

Erin Breen

As we finished dinner, I excused myself from the dining room table, telling my father I had something important to get from upstairs. I went to my room, climbed up on a chair and dug to the back of a cupboard above my closet. Behind the ceramic frog I'd made in art class, under the perfume that one of my brothers had given me for Christmas and beside a stack of brightly colored diaries I have kept to this day, I retrieved a dusty envelope with a list of numbers on it. They had been revised as the amount inside had changed over the summer. I carefully counted out every dollar I'd saved for baby-sitting, dog ...